​We've just moved across the Summer Solstice, and the Sun has entered the sign of Cancer. Meanwhile, Mars is moving into a square with Jupiter.

* Mars is in the superior position with respect to Jupiter, combust the Sun, and in its fall, but is also in the exaltation of Jupiter.* This means that Mars exerts a kind of forcefulness upon Jupiter but we might also say that Mars pays tribute to, or has respect for, Jupiter.* Mars in its fall, under the beams, is an old mars, and a weakened mars...one who at the end of life recognizes his or her limits, the end of his or her power, dominance, control, or ability to manipulate or coerce emotionally.* Mars may signify a pattern, whose time is up but who kicks and struggles before finally submitting in peace to what they know is best. It is painful to surrender.* This particular "old" Mars may signify an attempt to insult, injure, harm, or shame someone or something younger, or to withhold some parting blessing.* What happens when we no longer fear what happens if we don't serve something that isn't serving the love and peace in our hearts? Something loses power over us...and we find that the exact something that loses power over us, no longer given that power, can love us truly, sincerely, and may finally bless us rather than take from us.* Mars in its fall, under the beams, exalting Jupiter may also symbolize the prayer of surrender. "I can't do this on my own. I've been so blinded by my attempts to master my problems that I've forgotten to ask you for help. I'm sorry. Please help me."* What does it mean to be triumphant without triumph coming at the cost of another? What does it mean for justice to be done without resentment or self-righteousness?* Mars square to Jupiter may signify the wisdom of a retired or retiring warrior. Mars square to Jupiter may signify battle, war, or conflict at sea.* Mars square to Jupiter may represent the memorialization of a fight that no longer has to fight.* Mars square to Jupiter says, "I can't do this on my own, but I am still going to make my best effort."* Or Mars square to Jupiter says, "If I can't change the outcome, then the next best choice is to accept my circumstances and pray that my acceptance might be the planting of healthy new seeds for a different future."* Mars square to Jupiter says, "If I can't make all the changes now, then help me to stay the spirits of frustration and impatience. Help me to take one step forward, whatever step makes the most sense for me right now. Help me find that next step."* Mars square to Jupiter says, "I don't know how to get what I want in a healthy way?" or even, "Help me to know what the right needs are and how to feed only my healthiest needs."* Mars square to Jupiter is violence done in the name of a twisted sense of justice, or fairness...vindictiveness, or revenge, or anger, masquerading as God's righteousness.* An old and weakening Mars in square to Jupiter says, "Make me an instrument of your peace and justice in the world."* Mars square to Jupiter has too much to prove, and potentially overstates its accomplishments.* Mars square Jupiter says, "Don't let yourself be coerced. Follow your spiritual duties, first. And watch as the impossible becomes possible, and those who doubt or thwart you fall away."

Every one of our lives reflects both victory and justice, all the time, whether we feel or perceive it or not, in both the suffering and the joy.... because every one of our lives in its deepest sense reflects an unbreakable promise between our souls and God.​Prayer: Help us to stay the good course, and keep us safely concealed within the private victory and the secret justice of your love.

Mars is closing in on its square to Jupiter. The square will perfect Friday/Saturday of this week.

Here's what to watch for:

* Anger, militarism, pushing to get our way* Pride, arrogance, conceit, and exaggeration * Success, victory, the big deal, the big win* The attachment to success* Posturing, muscling up, showing off* The attempt to coerce, convince, or manipulate someone's goodness, virtue, success, or resources* The guilty purchase, perhaps made in response to a weakness or failing* Hard work, sweat, and effort pay off* The feeling of failure and the call to overcome weaknesses* Actions that breed great results, negative and positive, and the sense of justice, fairness, or karmic balancing* The tendency to overdo something in response to a shortcoming* The pride of failure* To right a wrong* The feeling of momentum building in our favor* The question about what or who is deserving of what* The big flop, the big fail* Embarrassment through overcompensation* Strength, pride, determination, and success* Taken to task* Military action, confrontation, saber rattling* An older military man is promoted or put in charge of the army* A veteran warrior's wisdom or late life insights* Finding deep resources for fighting or dealing with a challenge* Feeling invaded by or inundated or flooded by someone or something, perhaps an inner pattern, perhaps anger, irritation, or frustration, and needing to make a swift and appropriate response* Calling upon the wise leader within when dealing with a sudden onslaught of overwhelming energy, tasks, to-dos, or when feeling triggered* The wild, emotional driven powers of the martial temperament, restrained or held in check by powers of reason, maturity, wisdom, and temperance.

Sometimes the only way to learn something (Jupiter in Libra) is to get in over our heads, to lose our cool, to act out from a place of immaturity or emotional impulsiveness (Mars in Cancer), and for our actions to then create consequences that teach us the lesson we need to learn. We can't become a seasoned war veteran in the game of life without making mistakes and suffering consequences. At the same time, when we're in over our heads with something, calling on someone wiser than ourselves to help or assist us is a sign of strength, not weakness.

Real success is the success we find when we allow our will to be shaped, subdued, led, humbled, and strengthened by forces greater than us. We seek these greater and wiser, guiding forces specifically when we recognize that our typical use of "free will" is mostly shaped or co-opted by forces we pretend to be in control of.​Prayer: Show us with gentleness the roots of the will that is no longer serving us, and lead us to the will and way of love.

Mars is closing in on its square to Jupiter, while Jupiter is just starting to gain speed in direct motion again.

* The 11th hexagram of the I Ching is called "Peace," and it says, "The small departs, the great approaches."

* Hexagram 11 reminds us that by eliminating our willful appetites and ambitions, we align our will with the natural progression of change, and peace arises.

* Hexagram 11 is also an image of all yang pushing up and slowly causing a standstill or period of stagnation to transform. When one's desires are satisfied, there is a period of peace. However, the more we try to identify ourselves with this period of peace, the more we will be disappointed with, hurt, frustrated, or spun back into the same old cycles when peace alternates again to discord, difficulties, standstills, and so forth, all of which are natural to the material world we live in.

* Mars and Jupiter moving into a square reflect a dynamic period of activity, ambition, growth, action, expansion, exaggeration, hope, conquest, and excitement.

* Mars and Jupiter moving into a square reflect a militaristic, brave, and even impulsive desire to move forward, or to seek justice or fairness, or to balance the scales.

* Mars in Cancer is combust right now and will be gradually consumed by the Sun over the month of July before starting a new cycle and being "reborn." Given this symbolism, we might suggest that the current astrology also reflects the need to surrender some of our ambitions and consider instead the hidden gifts of failure and surrender.

* Juxtaposing hexagram 11 with the Mars/Jupiter dynamic, we see an image of yang pushing up to obtain an ideal state, a state of completion, victory, or harmony. But it happens naturally and gradually. Standstills and stagnation don't clear instantly. Let the change happen without becoming willful and pushy, otherwise whatever is achieved will be part of what eventually, and all the more quickly, exhausts us again.​Prayer: Teach us to watch success come and success go. Teach us to live in the ambitionless rivers and the radiant fires of your perfect will.

Mars is now moving into it square with Jupiter, which will perfect in the next ten days.

An I Ching meditation on this upcoming transit:

* Hexagram 47 of the I Ching, called "Exhausting," depicts a marsh whose water is being drained into an abyss below it.

* Hexagram 47 depicts a draining, depleting, or exhausting situation.

* When Mars in its fall, in the watery sign of Cancer, is in a square to Jupiter, we have the potential for a great drain of energy, resources, confidence, happiness, money, and faith.

* Hexagram 47 in conjunction with the Mars/Jupiter transit tells us that whatever we feel we've gained might be easily drained, taxed, depleted, or sucked out. Or we might be dealing with a general sense of depletion that is exaggerated by the expanding and enlargening influence of Jupiter.

* Hexagram 47's first line depicts someone who isn't thinking clearly or seeing clearly, and it depicts them in their defeatist mode, sitting on a bare tree stump, and getting lost in their despair.

* Hexagram 47's teaching has to do with joyousness and how a good and persevering attitude allows us to withstand periods where something is being drained out, or where we feel depleted or even a tendency toward being defeatist or glum.

* Hexagram 47 also has to do with the natural way in which things gained are lost, and where a spirit of enthusiasm is tested by sudden losses to gains, or unexpected setbacks that drain things we've gained.

* The first line depicts a person persevering in and getting lost in the kind of hollow joy that swings into hollow defeatism. When we wallow in what's been gained we will inevitably feel confused and bewildered and stuck when something gained is challenged, drained, or lost.

* Real faith is faith without attachment to the joy of gain or the sorrow of loss. Real cheerfulness is the attitude that appears to remind us of loss when we gain and gain when we lose. Real cheerfulness steers us around our ambitions and aversions.

* When 47 line 1 changes it leads to hexagram 58, which is called "Joyousness."

* Hexagram 58 depicts two lakes, conjoined, and thus shows an image of happiness, shared and large resources, and an abundant source of water, which is life and joy.

* Hexagram 58 suggests that the Mars/Jupiter dynamic simultaneously displays the wisdom of drain or gain, and the importance of how we interact with what we gain or what we lose.

* Hexagram 58 is all about the proper joy leading to good results. Self aggrandizing joy is intimately related to what will eventually be drained out from beneath us, and easily exhausted. However, deep joy feeds others, spreads, is shared, and moves circularly to fulfill us over and over because we are not possessive of it.

* The figure in line 1 of hexagram 47, sitting on the stump of a cut down tree, is someone caught in the cycle of joy/gain and sorrow/loss, and the lesson is about moderating the "bigness" of our ambitions...a direct relationship to Mars and Jupiter.

* As this transit unfolds, notice what energizes you, notice what depletes you, notice how you respond to gain and how you respond to loss. Think again about real cheerfulness being about what steers us out of the traps of both self satisfied joy or defeatist self-pitying sorrow.

Prayer: Teach us the cheerfulness that lets both gain and loss flow through us like a river of justice.

The Sun/Saturn opposition is just separating and the Sun is moving into a sextile with Uranus. Meanwhile, Mars in his fall and combust the Sun is now beginning its application to a square with Jupiter and an opposition with Pluto. 2017. What can you say?!

Well, there are two kinds of comments that I often receive from readers regarding "the times" we're living in. One is something along the lines of, "this is a necessary time of contraction and darkness in the midst of humanity laboring to birth a new, higher form of consciousness," and the second is, "this is something like the kali yuga we're living through, and it's only going to get worse." One view of time and history is linear and rooted in the idea that consciousness is evolving toward higher, perhaps more novel, or more sophisticated levels of consciousness, and the other is rooted in the idea that time moves in something like repeating, archetypal cycles, and we're merely in a dark cycle at the moment.

Along with these two views often come different associated comments, like, "We have to lift the vibration and act as midwives to the birth!" or "We have to do our best to help, we can't be passive, but that's because virtue is still important, even on a sinking ship."The bottom line seems to be that wherever we might stand on how we view history, our part in history has to do with choosing virtue. But that raises the question, "How do we act virtuously?"

When examining the history of the word "virtue," almost every major religious tradition on our planet suggests that virtue is cultivated by practice, and that virtue is also associated with some degree of inner happiness. So, the times we're living in call for virtue, virtue doesn't guarantee but is related to inner happiness, and virtue requires consistent practice, with devotion, over a long period of time.

Sometimes we hear the phrase, "To change the world you have to change yourself," and then we hear the criticism, "This is just bourgeois ambivalence speaking."

But if we set aside the rhetoric around "change," and "the world," and if we look within ourselves in the quiet, the truth is that real virtue within us, cultivated through real practice, with devotion, and consistency, over a long period of time, is extremely difficult. Most of us talk about it but don't do it. Most of us admire the classrooms of virtue, but then we write ourselves free hall passes all the time because we consider ourselves to be more or less "a good person," as though this excuses us from consistent practice and the cultivation of virtue. But is this any different than saying, well, despite the world being a mess, I'm a glass half-full kind of person, and then continuing to do nothing?

I bring all of this up today to put a seal on our examination of the Sun/Saturn dynamic. As the Sun is separating from Saturn, there is an undeniable call to cultivate virtue through practice. There is no commentary needed from us, no committed view of history, no elaborate take on the past, or the future, just the willingness to practice and to continue cultivating virtue within ourselves.Meanwhile, as Mars moves toward a square of Jupiter in the next week we will likely see a surge of competitive, martial energy. Mars will be expanded, exaggerated, and perhaps ennobled by Jupiter, but the square will also involve direct challenges to justice, fairness, balance, due-process and so forth (par for the course this year!). The subsequent opposition to Pluto will be deep, intense, penetrating and purgative. And these transits will become the focus of my daily meditations over the next few weeks, looking at them from a variety of different angles, and calling on the I Ching for regular counsel as we go.​Prayer: Give us the strength and the desire to cultivate virtue, so that the happiness we find within ourselves is given to others in simple and ordinary, but never-ending devotion.

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Author

Adam Elenbaas is a professional astrologer and the founder of the Nightlight Astrology School. Adam holds an MA and MFA in English and Creative Writing and is one of the founding writers at RealitySandwich. To learn more about Adam, click here.